


In the brightness

by WahlBuilder



Category: Mars: War Logs, The Technomancer (Video Game)
Genre: Feels, Grief/Mourning, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Surprise Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-17
Updated: 2018-08-17
Packaged: 2019-06-28 17:51:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15712116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WahlBuilder/pseuds/WahlBuilder
Summary: Word reaches Zach that he's lost his mentor, his beloved. Zach tries to cope.





	In the brightness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PolarGrizz47](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PolarGrizz47/gifts).



“Zach?”

“I’m okay.” He stumbles away from them: Andrew’s wary gaze, Amelia, Niesha… Scott. Phobos’s sympathy. He can’t bear any of it now. His stomach roils with it and he leans onto the warm rock, closes his eyes. Tries to breathe through it, the knots in his gut. The heaviness in his heart— no, the empty space where his heart has been, used to be.

Hope flutters inside him regardless: he can feel its pulse under the cover of his jacket. Maybe it’s not true. Maybe they took someone else for him—aren’t there any other technomancers? It must be a mistake.

Sean is not dead.

They move past him, voices subdued—why? He is not dead, there is no reason to be quiet! But Zach is left alone in the landing area, baking in the warmth of the day. The noise of Noctis is faded. A cry goes up, bouncing from the walls of the canyon. He cannot tell whether it’s a cry of joy or pain or fear.

Zach scrapes himself away from the rock after a while when the heat becomes unbearable. He feels dry, ready to crack. He stumbles into his room—doesn’t remember how. Reality moves in abrupt jerks.

He falls onto his bed without undressing.

###

Zach wakes up at night, the smell of incense cloying his nose. His chest is tight.

He curls up on his side, faced with the enormity of the truth: Sean is not here anymore.

They didn’t even get to hold each other for the last time.

###

Masters Ian and Connor, still weak from their narrow escape from the ASC, start the first tale about Sean during the vigil. They are holding hands throughout it.

Zach cannot look at them.

###

Days blur into each other. He hunts, he fights, he talks, he eats, he sleeps—but it feels like he’s doing all this while lost in a sandstorm: it’s dark and he’s all alone.

Maybe Sean would have been disappointed in him. He supposes he should be angry, thinks he should be spiteful. Fight, fight, fight, because there is so much anger.

Maybe it will come yet.

He thinks about leaving all this, disappearing into the storm like a sand ghost. He won’t do it, of course: he has the duty to his kindred, to the Dust, to Noctis.

Not to Abundance, however. Abundance takes people and turns them into tools and weapons. Abundance is a self-serving war machine.

_Abundance killed his beloved._

The anger he feels for that mysterious rogue technomancer is present—but it’s obscured by the anger at the brass who sent Sean there, at Viktor, at the whole system. At fate, for making them technomancers.

He knows Sean would have admonished him for such a thought. Technomancy is not a curse. But Zach allows himself to be angry with things he cannot change—otherwise he’d choke on guilt.

Others talk to him: of that guilt, of anger, of acceptance. He dreads the day when acceptance would settle in him and the wound would turn into a scar.

Amelia and Andrew don’t talk, Niesha, Scott and Phobos do. Not one of them knows what it is to Zach. What Sean is. Only other technomancers know. And Zach doesn’t explain to those who don’t.

It is only _his_ , as so few things ever were in his life.

He can’t wait for the day of acceptance to come, because then he would stop thinking about his world being hollow, and would fight for other people again.

###

It is a bright day— _(he will remember that thing clearly: it was a very bright day)_ —the kind of day when the winds of Noctis bring with them the scent of warm sand. The kind of dry heat that makes Zach consider and then take off his uniform jacket—for the first time in many days. He throws on a light shirt and reviews their finances.

Amelia practically lives in her rover, Niesha has her own lodgings, but Scott and the technomancers are stationed at the Palace, in its seemingly infinite number of rooms. They pay neither for their bed nor for food: Dandolo simply refuses to accept payment for that (Zach doesn’t want to think of it as the Prince’s means to ensuring their loyalty; at some point he thought it had something to do with Melvin sneaking up the twin stairs at night—but Melvin looks so blindingly _happy_ , and Zach knows it’s not the case of payment). Dandolo’s generosity allows them to save up—but with the war with the ASC near inevitable, costs are going to rise. They need better materials, better gear, fuel, supplies. The rover and the borrowed sandsails need constant maintenance, and technomantic gear, even only with Zach and Andrew out in the field, requires certain things to keep it in prime state. The cost of skimping on gear is someone’s life.

He has to account for the situation that all present technomancers might need to fight. The calculations don’t look reassuring.

He sighs—then hears pounding and skidding on the floor outside his room, and he looks up.

Amelia grabs the doorframe to stop her skidding. Her face is flushed and there is a smear of grease on her cheek, but that’s not new. The brightness in her eyes definitely _is_. “Zach, you gotta get out!”

He gets to his feet, heart sinking. Could it be that the ASC has reached Noctis? He doesn’t hear the alarm in the city, but maybe he’s missed it?

He reaches for the staff (there is no time to put on his jacket, there will be burns, but he’ll live)—but Amelia grabs his wrist. “You don’t need all this! Let’s go!”

She drags him out. Something he doesn’t need to fight? It’s not that he is defenseless without his staff, it’s that he’s—

Amelia pulls him across the main hall of the Palace and through the small door in the gates, down the steps—so fast he barely escapes a horrible death on the steps.

They dash across the marketplace, Zach’s shirttails flapping. There is a significant crowd by the front gates of the city, but Amelia pushes through with lots of good-hearted bickering—her hand never easing the grip on Zach’s wrist. He mutters apologies in her wake, but the Noctis simply waves his words away. Then finally, Amelia pushes him to the front of the crowd.

Zach is even more confused.

There are newcomers. They are not from Noctis, that much is certain: the state of their dress, shabby, dusted, makes them look apart from Noctis’s merchants. There is a lot of mutants among them, thin, all bones, and Phobos is already engaged in a conversation with one of them.

But it is definitely something more than just new people: Dandolo is here, too. He is talking with a handsome man: tall, broad, with a thick mane of red hair and a bushy beard, a sturdy jacket open at the front. A giant dark hound reaching up to his shoulder, standing quietly by his side. Zach has never seen such big hounds. Behind the man’s back there is a most singular weapon: a long rifle but with a cross-piece. The man and Dandolo embrace—a full-body, tight thing. Then the Prince plants a lingering kiss to the man’s cheek.

Zach arches his eyebrows.

Then, he feels that he’s being watched.

The past weeks his awareness of his surroundings has been dim, his senses turned inwards—but now, now there is the taste of metal in his mouth. A gust of wind plays with his shirt. Blood rushes through his body, the charge gathering, tightening. Zach looks at the source of that scrutiny.

And the whole world stops.

Zach wishes he had picked his staff. He wishes he had put on the jacket and the gloves.

He won’t need any of them.

News travel among the mutants mouth to ear, and details have been inevitably lost, changed, embellished—but one thing remained: the eyes. One golden ( _red as blood_ , others said), one the color of the dawn sky ( _the color of Earth_ , others objected). A Devil’s eyes. A Devil’s words. A Devil’s hands. He fought and fought and fought, they said, and nobody could stop him. Not the guards, not the deadly plains could stop him. He was the Devil, and the Dust had struck a bargain with him again, and he gave them the means to achieve freedom.

And now he has come here. His jacket just as dusty as the clothes of others. The notches on his temples.

The glove on his left hand.

Zach cannot look away from that glove, a roar stuck in his throat. He can’t get it out, and he brings a hand to his neck. He’s choking. He’s dying.

The man—the killer, _Roy_ , he remembers, how can the Devil have a name?—shifts. Zach wishes him to stand there. Wishes him to stand still, so he could tear his head off his neck.

He is choking.

But the man with Devil’s eyes doesn’t hear his silent wish (the universe never does), and moves aside, looking over his shoulder.

Zach’s hand drops from his neck.

He doesn’t comprehend it. It cannot be. He has been waiting, waiting and waiting, for the day of acceptance, for the day of death—whichever would come first—and somewhere along the way, that tiny sparkle of hope fade in him.

And now, now…

He’s there.

 _He_ is there.

Tired, thin, the dark gray of his uniform swapped for a thick mole-hide jacket. His hair longer than Zach remembers, the circlet of wires gone. There is only one glove: the right one. His left hand bare, gripping his staff.

His smile is brittle and the most beautiful thing in the world.

The sound that has been choking Zach tears out of his throat, and it’s not a roar of anger, but a cry of joy.

He makes a few steps forward—they move towards each other, like they couldn’t that last time, that horrible time when they said goodbye.

And Zach falls into Sean’s arms.

And the world moves again.

**Author's Note:**

> This story might be considered as a prequel to [Right Here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13612776).


End file.
